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The eighty-five-year-old photographer Arthur Tress has had a long and busy career, but the photographs that continue to define him are from the nineteen-seventies. Most of them are oddly charged, dramatically staged images meant to evoke dreams, nightmares, or fantasies. Many of the best-known photos from a series with children, published in 1972 as “The Dream Collector,” could be frames from a David Lynch film. Much of the subsequent work Tress made was similarly theatrical but tended to involve homoerotic scenes. In one picture, a slim teen-ager reaches over tentatively, tenderly, to peel a bandage off another boy’s bare thigh, a moment both touching and wonderfully matter-of-fact. Tress’s approach during this period recalls that of his friend and mentor Duane Michals, another maverick. Both photographers are storytellers, impatient with the limitations of the photograph as a document, and looking for ways to open it up to the imagination. Although their work with the male body anticipated more radical and more widely seen images from Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Bruce Weber, and others, its detour into narrative tended to place it outside of any larger conversations. I remember thinking that Tress’s photography was intriguing but melodramatic and a bit overwrought. I never spent much time with it.

Tress’s new book, “The Ramble, NYC 1969” (Stanley/Barker), and a related exhibition currently at the Clamp gallery, in Chelsea, makes me rethink all this. The work was made concurrently with another series, “Open Space in the Inner City: Ecology and the Urban Environment.” The Ramble, a wooded area on the center-west side of Central Park, was its own “urban environment.” But Tress’s prime interest was in the people he found there: mostly good-looking but otherwise unremarkable young men who were passing through, standing around, and waiting. Long before Tress arrived, the Ramble was known as a place where gay men hooked up and had sex in the bushes. In 1968, when he was in his late twenties, the photographer lived at Riverside Drive and Seventy-second Street, a short walk from the Park, and, as he told the playwright Jordan Tannahill in Interview, the rocky, overgrown Ramble was “my own private cruising grounds.”

The Ramble’s ever-shifting population was more various than any gay bar’s. When Tress started taking his camera to the Park, he photographed some men “surreptitiously” but often asked first if it was O.K. For many, it wasn’t. Even if gay sex was beginning to be decriminalized at the time, a lot of the men who cruised for sex were married or closeted or otherwise on the down-low. We can’t know much about the men who did agree to be seen in Tress’s pictures, only that they comprise a small part of the population that used these paths as meeting places and hunting grounds before the sun went down. But are these photographs performances or documents? How much does Tress’s subjects’ consent compromise the “truth” of these pictures? “My work has always been a little bit of improvised, stage-directed imagery,” Tress told Tannahill. He calls it “poetic documentary.”

Even when these handsome young men are obviously posing for Tress’s camera, the work is rich and fascinating, providing a view into a world otherwise all but invisible to passersby. Tress told the writer and curator Jackson Davidow, who wrote an essay for “The Ramble,” that he’d been cruising since he was fifteen. Recalling “layers of guilt and fear” that he and others had to work through, he suggests that many of his pictures could be seen as self-portraits. So he’s especially alert to expressions of anticipation, yearning, disappointment, and the kind of loneliness that even a flash of attention can’t dispel. Some of Tress’s images are jolting, including one of a bare-chested man who appears through some thorny branches, his wide-eyed stare so intense that he looks possessed—at once sightless and a seer. Other photographs suggest sympathy or concern. In one, Tress’s subject is perched on a rock, hands clasped over his folded legs, as compact as he can be but still anxious, apprehensive. Another guy, lying on the ground in dappled sunlight, is viewed from above at a moment of unself-conscious surrender—he’s one of several subjects who looks ready to fall in love.

Such pictures provide “The Ramble” with an emotional element, but what Tress does best here is reportorial—giving us a sense of place and of ritual. Some men stop and wait to see what comes along; others keep going, always on the lookout. In many of the images, the man whom Tress has focussed on is unaware of another man nearly hidden in the foliage or on a rocky outcropping, just a few feet away—a missed connection that can seem at once poignant and comic. Tress surely recognized himself in all these men, from the saddest shrinking violet to the happy flasher with nothing under his trenchcoat but pants cut off just above the knees. But if “The Ramble” forms an extended self-portrait it also provides a mirror for its readers, queer and otherwise, navigating a world full of possibility that we don’t dare reach out and touch.

Early in my freshman year of college, a speeding car struck my twin brother, Jim, on a street near our campus. These were pre-cellphone days, but I happened to be in my dorm room when the call came in, so I got to ride with my brother in the ambulance. Our sister, Alice, who was in the year ahead of us, soon arrived at the hospital.

Shortly after the orderlies wheeled Jim away to be intubated, an intensive-care doctor explained to me and Alice that our brother was suffering from acute respiratory failure. This man, whom we’d never seen before, casually added that Jim was unlikely to make it to morning. Then he continued on his rounds. The first thing we did, once he’d left, was pray.

We’d been raised in a devout Catholic home, attending Mass every Sunday and on holy days of obligation, saying grace before meals, prayers before bed, and rosaries on long car rides, constantly adding sick or troubled loved ones to our intentions list. At the hospital, praying together was a distraction, but it was also an act that we believed to have some power to help our brother live through the night.

As it happens, he did live through it. His recovery was long—months stretching into years—but ultimately complete. I thanked God for that. But the memory of that first night, when I thought I was losing him forever, stayed with me. The recognition of radical human vulnerability pushes some people toward belief, but for me it had the opposite effect. On campus that spring, I started skipping Mass. This proved to be the initial step on a path that eventually led to my rejection of the faith in which I’d been raised. An answered prayer made me an atheist.

In many ways, those years—the turn of the twenty‑first century—were an ideal time to be a budding unbeliever. In 2004, an unknown writer named Sam Harris published “The End of Faith,” a short polemic on the existential threat that religion posed to Western civilization. In rapid succession, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” (2006), Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell” (2006), and Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” (2007) followed Harris’s book onto best-seller lists, and the so-called Four Horsemen became the public face of a resurgent New Atheism. But I quickly discovered that I was not the audience for these books. I wasn’t looking to talk my way out of a belief in God—I was already out. I wanted to know what to believe in instead.

If I was still in search of beliefs, many atheists would object, I hadn’t really gotten over my religious upbringing. A good atheist deals not in faith but in facts, not in belief but in knowledge. Yet I could find no obvious factual, knowledge-based answer to the question that was most pressing to me: How am I to live?

I don’t mean to suggest that the New Atheists had no moral sense. On the contrary, they were largely fuelled by moral outrage at the needless suffering religion caused. But the nature of morality was seemingly the only thing about which they did not care to argue. They thought it simply self‑evident that we desire pleasure over pain for ourselves, and that any decent person wished the same for others. One of religion’s greatest harms, they believed, was that it turned people away from this basic intuition. Of the Four Horsemen, only Harris aspired to a “science of good and evil” which could subject moral claims to the same rational scrutiny as all other claims, but his chapter on the topic quickly devolves into an argument about the indefensibility of pacifism and the moral necessity of government torture. (It was a strange time.)

Anyway, I wasn’t really looking for practical guidance. To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.

Setting down the popular polemics of the day, I began to read modern philosophy, which I understood to be the primary means by which humans have sought secular answers to life’s questions. I read the philosophers most frequently cited as models by modern‑day atheists—John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill—as well as those whom meaning‑hungry young people habitually embrace as secular gurus: Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Camus. But I also read philosophers who are mostly read just by other philosophers.

Even when I was struggling with the most challenging of these works, the reading felt urgent to me. I wasn’t submitting papers or getting grades; I wasn’t looking to earn a degree or to pursue a career. I wasn’t even trying to impress people at literary parties. (For that, I had thousand‑page postmodern novels.) I was just trying to figure things out. Immanuel Kant’s three “critiques” are often cited as the works that first made philosophy inaccessible to nonspecialists, but in Kant’s opinion he was addressing very straightforward questions—What can I know?, What must I do?, and What may I hope? I was decidedly a nonspecialist, and these were the questions I wanted answered.

Among other things, this reading taught me that atheists do hold beliefs, not just about morals and ethics but about how the world actually is and how humans fit into it. Of course, not all atheists hold the same beliefs—just as not all theists do—but I found that modern atheist belief tends to cluster into two broad traditions.

The most prevalent atheist world view goes by many names—empiricism, positivism, physicalism, naturalism—but the term that best captures the fullness of its present‑day iteration, as I see it, is scientific materialism. Roughly speaking, this view holds that the material world is all that exists, that humans can know this world through sense perception, that the methods of science allow us to convert the raw data of these perceptions into general principles, and that these principles can be both tested and put to practical use by making predictions about future events.

As world views go, scientific materialism has a lot to say for it. It tells us that humans are capable, without any supernatural aid, of coming to understand, and ultimately to master, all of reality. It tells us that the store of human knowledge is constantly increasing and continuously improving our material conditions. To this end, it points to the astonishing human progress that has occurred in the time of science’s reign. And it encourages us to enjoy the fruits of this progress as much as possible, since our life here on earth is the only one we’ll get.

Most people who subscribe to scientific materialism take it to be so obviously correct that it could not be denied by any rational person who truly understood it. But my reading showed me that this world view has its shortcomings. The most basic is perhaps inherent to any world view at all: it rests on a set of principles which often can’t be proven, even by the standards of proof the world view embraces. The general principle that all real knowledge is derived from sense perception of material facts cannot itself be derived from the perception of facts in the world, and thus can’t really be sanctioned by scientific materialism’s own methods. Indeed, no general principle can be. The very legitimacy of deriving general principles from the particulars of experience can never be established from experience without already having the principle in hand.

This so-called problem of induction was first identified not by any counter-Enlightenment reactionary but by the Scottish empiricist David Hume. Earlier empiricists like Locke and Francis Bacon believed that the physical sciences should still be grounded partly in metaphysical belief. Hume became one of modern atheism’s great intellectual heroes by rejecting this idea. But he didn’t substitute some other foundation in its place. Instead, he argued that we should simply do without foundations entirely, apart from the rather shaky ones of custom, habit, and expedience. That has been more or less the scientific-materialist answer to the problem ever since: scientific materialism just works.

If by “works” one means that it can be put to good use, this is unquestionably so. But, if we mean that it captures within its frame all the notable features of our experience, that’s a different matter. In fact, what materialism can’t adequately capture is experience itself. Consciousness is not material, not publicly available through sense perception, not subject to the kind of observation that scientific materialism takes as the hallmark of knowledge. By the standards of the materialist world view, it simply doesn’t exist. For me, this limitation proved fatal. I spent far too much time within the confines of my mind to accept a world view that told me whatever was going on in there wasn’t real.

Luckily, I’d by then come into contact with the other great family of modern atheist belief, which I eventually came to call romantic idealism. This is the atheism of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and their existentialist descendants, which begins in precisely the place where scientific materialism leaves off, with the will of the subjective, conscious agent. At its most extreme, romantic idealism treats each of us as willing our own world into being, creating the reality in which we live. Even when it does not go quite this far, it treats our subjective experience as the proper subject of knowledge, in fact the only thing we can ever be said to know.

Romantic idealism arose in the post‑Enlightenment era, and it grew in opposition to the principles of Enlightenment rationality as much as it did to religious authority. Although atheism is often associated with hyperrationality, this form of it is unapologetically irrational. In place of reason, observation, and scientific study, it valorizes emotion, imagination, and artistic creativity. The ethics of romantic idealism are an ethics of authenticity: the greatest good is not maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain but living in a way that is true to our subjective reality. The movement rejects religious belief not for being empirically false but for being a ready‑made and inherited response to existential problems that we must work out for ourselves. The appeal of this world view—particularly for a young person engaged in just such a working out—should be obvious, and I soon found myself in thrall to it.

Like scientific materialism, romantic idealism does not have a solid foundation in any provable universal truth. But it revels in this condition: it is the lack of any such foundation that makes it possible for each of us to construct our own truth. This relativism carries clear dangers. Since the time of Locke, empiricism has been closely linked with political liberalism, whereas romantic idealism is associated with rather darker political forces. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the founders of Romanticism, was a great inspiration for the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. He argued that liberalism’s supposed universal rights were covers for bourgeois self-interest. This argument was later developed at great length by Nietzsche, one of several thinkers in this tradition who inspired the rise of fascism.

A more basic problem with romantic idealism occurs on the personal level: building meaning from scratch turns out to be an incredibly difficult task. The romantic-idealist approach is fraught with fear and trembling, a fact it doesn’t deny. It is not a route to happiness; indeed, it seems to hold the goal of happiness in contempt. (“Mankind does not strive for happiness,” Nietzsche wrote. “Only the Englishman does that.”) Many romantic-idealist writers have been fascinated by the “problem” of suicide—the problem, in their view, being that there’s no good reason not to do it.

It was this element of romantic idealism which finally led to my rejection of it. I grew tired of being unhappy and anxious all the time, of constantly questioning whether life was worth the trouble. One cause of the feeling, for me, was that the materialists had it right on an important point: there is, indeed, a world outside our heads that cannot be ignored or overpowered through force of will, and denying this is a recipe for misery.

After nearly twenty years of searching unsuccessfully for a livable atheist world view, I began, in my mid-thirties, to entertain the possibility that atheism itself might be part of the problem. There were many steps from here to my eventual return to robust belief, but I started with the notion that for me the authentic life might be one of faith—one that recognized the existence of both the external material world and the internal ideational world and sought to reconcile them, and one that accepted an absolute foundation to things and attempted to understand, in some provisional and imperfect way, the nature of this foundation and what it wanted from me.

Roughly a decade has now passed since my return to theistic belief. Barring some extreme change, this second period of faith will soon have lasted longer than my years of atheist wandering. Yet those years will always be with me, and I’m grateful for them. They have made me understand the world around me, one lately marked by sorrow and despair, in a radically different way than I would have otherwise.

The signal predicament of our era is the global rise of illiberalism and intolerance. Secular liberals who have observed these forces with quite justified horror have often linked them to a familiar enemy: religion. In their view, Christian nationalism is one of the primary ideologies behind right‑wing illiberalism. Meanwhile, they tend to see the strain of left‑wing thought which rejects universalist liberal principles as equally under the sway of a kind of faith—the “cult” or “Church” of identity politics. (Richard Dawkins, of “The God Delusion,” speaks for many of them when he declared “woke” to be a “latter‑day Torquemadism . . . with its own religiously enforced dogma.”)

“Religion” is a famously malleable sociological category, but, if we stick to the criterion of theistic belief, the argument that modern‑day illiberalism is primarily a religious movement does not really hold up. Perhaps the crudest way to make the point would be simply to note that the rise of illiberalism has gone hand in hand with a decline of theistic belief and religious practice—both in the United States and around the world. The avatar of American illiberalism, Donald Trump, is the first President in generations who does not even pretend to be influenced or motivated by Christian faith. Trump is best understood as our first Nietzschean President, a man who explicitly embraces the will to power as the ultimate value, a force to which even the truth must give way.

Many of the young and highly educated cohorts who populate the portions of the left most suspicious of universal liberal values are also among those least likely to identify as religious believers. In a different manner than Trump, they hold that so-called objective “truths” are the expression of power dynamics—tools used by the élite to oppress the marginalized. In place of these truths, they champion the importance of identity and authenticity. In other words, large groups of both the left and the right have become romantic idealists, and they have come to pose the same challenge to liberalism and scientific rationalism that romantic idealism has always posed to these traditions.

Meanwhile, the failure of these traditions to respond adequately to the challenge is bound up with the problem identified by their earliest proponents: they have a very hard time articulating their foundational justification. When liberalism runs smoothly, it does a remarkable job delivering the goods it promises. For most people, this is a sufficient achievement to quiet any worries about its philosophical underpinnings. But when many people within liberal societies do not feel that the system is working, when the practical case for liberalism comes into question, secular liberals don’t have much else to go on.

For early liberals like Locke, it seemed obvious that liberalism—like empiricism—needed to be grounded in faith, even as it sought to enshrine tolerance for different varieties of belief. For Locke, the fact that we have immortal souls subject to eternal punishment and reward means that it’s irrational to submit to a government that denies God’s will as we understand it, no matter how much coercive power that government has. At the same time, Locke had the empiricist’s healthy suspicion that we could never have metaphysical certainty about what the Creator’s will was, which meant that no person should impose his answer to that question on another. It is for these reasons that faith must be treated as a matter of personal conscience, but also more generally that a regime grounded in a social contract must be one that respects individual freedoms. Our status as creatures of God confers on us certain rights that can’t be handed over as part of the social contract, rights that are at once natural and inalienable.

Many of the Founding Fathers held this same view. But, after Hume, liberals came increasingly to find even the barest invocation of metaphysical principles to be an embarrassment. The great post-Humean liberal theorist Jeremy Bentham called the idea of natural rights “nonsense,” and the idea of inalienable natural rights “nonsense on stilts.” Some liberals have tried to hold on to such abstract concepts without the metaphysical framework in which they make sense, but many eventually came to the Humean conclusion that liberalism could simply do without foundations, so long as it got the job done.

My own passage into and back out of unbelief—one marked by a close reading of works that earlier illiberal societies had attempted to suppress on religious grounds—has strengthened my liberal commitments. But it’s also made me acutely aware of liberalism’s very real limitations. As a means for allowing people with different conceptions of the good to live together fruitfully and peacefully, liberalism seems unmatched in human history. As a means of generating its own conceptions of goodness that feel compelling to most human beings, its record is quite mixed, perhaps because that’s not what it was ever designed to do.

What’s more, when liberals treat some version of scientific materialism as so self-evidently true that it must serve as the default context for public discourse; when they make allegiance to “reason” and “evidence,” as they define these terms, the price of admission into such discourse; and when they attempt to banish metaphysical or spiritual or even frankly religious talk from our politics and our culture, they are not practicing liberalism as its greatest exemplars understood it. They are eliminating from our shared vocabulary many of the concepts on which any justification for liberalism beyond the purely practical would have to depend.

I am not suggesting that the solution to our problems is for secular liberals to find God. But I am suggesting that religious believers be considered natural allies in the fight against irrational illiberalism, rather than its primary cause. This need not mean abandoning secularism, and it certainly doesn’t mean abandoning liberalism. It means, perhaps, seeing liberalism as so many liberals wish believers would see their faith: not as the expression of a universal truth to which every person must eventually submit but as a human construction—one of the finest we have ever made—worth defending even when it is helpless to defend itself, yet capable of being swept away by the same hands that built it in the first place. ♦

This is drawn from “Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.”

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The Washington Roundtable discusses Donald Trump’s recent “explosion of the ego” and tendency toward megalomania, and they consider how the evolution of autocratic regimes in history can help us to predict how the rest of his Presidency may unfold. They are joined by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, who is the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” The group looks at how, as autocrats’ popularity decreases—as Trump’s has recently in the polls—these figures develop paranoia and entrench themselves in untenable positions, a phenomenon called “autocratic backfire.” “The key is that they end up constructing a kind of echo chamber. And so they overestimate their own abilities,” Ben-Ghiat says. “They start to believe their own propaganda.”

This week’s reading:

“ ‘If We Don’t Have Free Speech, Then We Just Don’t Have a Free Country,’ ” by Susan B. Glasser

“Pam Bondi’s Contempt for Congress,” by Ruth Marcus

“Is There a Remedy for Presidential Profiteering?,” by David D. Kirkpatrick

“What Does Xi Jinping Want?” by Isaac Chotiner

“Bad Bunny’s All-American Super Bowl Halftime Show,” by Kelefa Sanneh

“Jeffrey Epstein’s Bonfire of the Élites,” by John Cassidy

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

The grim news out of Tucson is that, thirteen days into the search for Nancy Guthrie, the odds of finding her alive have been dropping by the hour. She is the eighty-four-year-old mother of Savannah Guthrie, the longtime co-anchor of the “Today” show. Not long after midnight on February 1st, she vanished from her home in an affluent neighborhood in the Catalina Foothills, on the north end of town. The investigation seemed to inch along until Tuesday, when the Pima County Sheriff’s Department and the F.B.I., working jointly on the case, got a break: footage from Guthrie’s doorbell camera, which showed what the veteran journalist and former F.B.I. official John Miller described, on CNN, as “the bogeyman we’ve all feared since we were kids.” An armed intruder stood on Guthrie’s doorstep in the dead of night, wearing a balaclava, a bulky backpack, and what appeared to be black neoprene gloves.

Within twenty-four hours, more than five thousand leads poured in. By Thursday, investigators were looking for a man who’s about five feet nine or five feet ten, of average build. He was said to have been carrying a twenty-five-litre backpack made by Ozark Trail, a brand sold primarily at Walmart. There was talk of a white, unmarked van. Investigators erected a tent around Guthrie’s front door to create a blackout environment that may have allowed them to see how certain materials compared to what showed up in the video; they put out a call for neighbors’ security-camera footage from as far back as January 1st.

Demands for bitcoin had been made to TMZ and other media outlets, but their authenticity remains in question. On Thursday, TMZ’s founder, Harvey Levin, said that he’d received another note from someone who purports to know who abducted Guthrie. According to Levin, the tipster reported needing one bitcoin (worth, this week, at least sixty-five thousand dollars) to say more. The veracity of the note was again unclear, but Levin suggested that it painted “a very bleak picture.”

The F.B.I. doubled its reward for information, to up to a hundred thousand dollars, and the world went back to waiting. Time lines in such cases are vital, and this one was stretching out. The clock started on the evening of January 31st, a Saturday, when Guthrie took an Uber to the home of her daughter Annie, who lives nearby, for dinner and a game night. Annie is Savannah’s older sister; they also have a brother, Camron. According to Sheriff Chris Nanos and the F.B.I., Annie’s husband dropped Guthrie off at home just before 10 P.M., and watched her enter through her garage. Nanos later said that, at that point, “we assume that Nancy’s home and probably going to bed.”

The next morning, she failed to show up at a friend’s house to watch a recording of a church service. Inside her own home was her cellphone, along with other evidence that made it clear she had not left willingly. There was blood spatter on her front stoop, and the blood turned out to be hers. Guthrie was already physically vulnerable. She has trouble walking, and, because of a heart condition, she takes life-sustaining medicine and wears a pacemaker.

On day four of the search, the Guthrie siblings released a video on social media. They sat together on a sofa, in front of a camera, backdropped by a white brick wall. Savannah, with her sister to her right and her brother to her left, read from a sheet of paper. Her face wasn’t made up, as it is for TV, and she spoke in a congested voice that anyone who’s ever cried hard, and at length, would recognize. First, she thanked viewers for their prayers: “We feel them.” The siblings believed that their mother, a devout Christian, felt them, too.

“Our mom is a kind, faithful, loyal, fiercely loving woman of goodness and light,” Savannah said. “She is funny and spunky and clever. She has grandchildren that adore her and crowd around her and cover her with kisses. She loves fun, and adventure. She is a devoted friend. She is full of kindness and knowledge.” Addressing Guthrie’s abductor, she added, “Talk to her, and you’ll see.” Her sister spoke directly to their mother, “Mama. If you’re listening, we need you to come home.”

By the time I arrived in Tucson, on Wednesday, the crime scene had the air of a vigil. The parked vehicles of journalists stretched the length of the once quiet block. A battery of news cameras stood on tripods, all pointed at Guthrie’s front door. Camera operators and correspondents maneuvered carefully, so as not to be pricked by cacti and the long thorns of mesquite trees. Guthrie’s neighborhood is hilly, and dense with the native plants of the Sonoran Desert: acacia and olive trees, prickly pear, palo verde, giant saguaros, some of which stand twenty or more feet tall. Investigators had fanned out in the neighborhood, searching the terrain on foot. One team found and bagged, as evidence, a black glove.

TV news outlets had been treating this and every other twitch in the case as urgent information, before any connection was drawn. The glove, found about a mile and a half from Guthrie’s house, on the side of the road, may be significant, or not; it’s at a forensics lab, being analyzed for traces of DNA, hair, fibres, latent fingerprints. Criminals often separate themselves from evidence as quickly as they can, but so far it is impossible to know whether the glove was, say, tossed from a fleeing vehicle. Lance Leising, a retired F.B.I. agent whom I first met in 2012, as he worked the baffling aftermath of a high-profile ambush and murder of an armored-car guard in suburban Phoenix, told me that conjecture and social media often become “a distraction.”

Guthrie lives on nearly an acre, in a brown-brick, ranch-style house with an attached garage, a short gravel driveway, and desert landscaping. She has been there since the mid-seventies. (Her husband died in 1988.) Her neighbors live within easy walking distance but their homes are barely visible, one to the next, because of folds in the hills and the density of trees and cacti. A sheriff’s cruiser was stationed in Guthrie’s driveway, its lights flashing. At the foot of the driveway, someone had erected a large sign, covered in protective plastic, that read “Dear Guthrie Family, your neighbors stand with you.” A painted stone read “Please pray.” Visitors were leaving potted plants and grocery-store flowers, many of them yellow, symbolizing hope for a safe return. Whenever someone new arrived at the tribute point, reporters pounced on them for comment.

By then, investigators had checked Guthrie’s flat, whitewashed roof and probed her septic tank with a long pole. They had towed away her car. They had searched Annie’s home, and re-searched Nancy’s. Two drones buzzed overhead, and a chopper was up. The public had been fed aerial views of the property: a tidy back-yard parabola of green grass that led to a gated swimming pool and aqua chaise longues; blue planters; an orange tree; a patio with string lights.

John Voorhies, a Tucsonian of sixty-two years, was standing in front of Guthrie’s home, watching the activity. He’d come with a friend—a paralegal and a TikToker who had driven seven hours, from Huntington Beach, California, to see the crime scene and opine about it. Voorhies, wearing an earpiece in his right ear, was listening to this friend live-stream while strolling up and down the street. Eventually, the TikToker stopped and pointed his cellphone camera at Guthrie’s home. The sobering details of the case included the fact that her doorbell camera was disconnected at 1:47 A.M., and that at 2:12 A.M. software detected motion, though it was unclear which software, or what this meant. At 2:28 A.M., Guthrie’s pacemaker disconnected from the app that monitored it, providing an important clue to when she was taken.

Leising described five reasons someone might commit a kidnapping: financial gain, ideology, domestic discord, exploitation (for example, sex trafficking), and “delusion,” or mental illness. One could not help wondering whether Savannah Guthrie’s prominence—at a time when President Donald Trump has spent the better part of a decade calling journalists “the enemy of the American people”—was a factor. Tucson is Savannah’s home town; she went to college and got her start in broadcasting here. In November, in a “Today” show feature, she included her sister and mother in a scene at El Charro, a historic restaurant, where she asked Guthrie what she likes about where she lives. Guthrie mentioned “the air, the quality of life—it’s laidback and gentle.” They toasted with prickly-pear margaritas.

On Monday, Savannah had posted another video on social media. This time she appeared alone, speaking extemporaneously as her family entered “another week of this nightmare.” Her hair and makeup were done. She was composed. The media was reporting that there was a 5 P.M. deadline for delivering six million dollars’ worth of bitcoin referenced in one of the so-called ransom notes. Savannah again mentioned faith, telling viewers that their prayers are “lifting” their mother, “even in this moment, and in this darkest place.” The Guthries believed that Nancy was “still out there.” Savannah begged the public for help: “We are at an hour of desperation.”

The images from the doorbell camera show the intruder approaching the alcoved entryway of Guthrie’s house with his head down, walking hunched over, as if trying to avoid his face being seen. In addition to the balaclava, gloves, and backpack, he’s got on a holster that is too big for what looks like a handgun inside it. He’s positioned the holster over his crotch—almost like you’d wear an athletic cup—which anyone with firearms training would recognize as amateurish. (“Tactically, it’s ridiculous,” Miller, the former F.B.I. official, said.) Reflector strips on his backpack catch a bit of ambient light, though the overhead porch light is off. He steps onto Guthrie’s doormat, reaches for the camera, and tries to cover it with his right hand. Then he turns and bends, looking for something on the ground, in the alcove, before stepping onto the front walkway and plucking stems and leaves from a withered plant in the landscaping. He walks back to the camera, with what appears to be a small flashlight between his lips, and tries to obscure the lens with that clump of dead greenery.

The video yielded what Andrew McCabe, a former deputy director of the F.B.I., called, on CNN, “a treasure trove” of actionable information. Leising told me, “You can go proactive on every item you saw in that video,” adding that the release of the footage likely improved the quality of the incoming leads. The analysis began instantly. The man appeared to be right-handed. His gloves were oddly thick, as if he’d doubled or tripled up. He didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry. A former N.Y.P.D. detective told CNN that the suspect’s foot size could be approximated by measuring his shoes against the dimensions of Guthrie’s entryway tiles. The bricks in the entryway wall could roughly indicate height. A criminologist thought that she saw the top of a cellphone peeking out of the man’s right front jacket pocket. Observers kept talking about the man’s gait, but it was hard to draw any conclusions; Leising told me that people often move differently in the dark and when on unfamiliar ground. Facial recognition would be challenging—the balaclava left bare only the suggestion of a mustache, and a possible soul patch, and dark, arched eyebrows.

Did he arrive by automobile? If so, where was it? During the first week of the search, the New York Post reported that one of Guthrie’s neighbors had alerted police to the presence, in the neighborhood, in January, of an unmarked white van. Among the many questions being asked: Was this even a targeted kidnapping at all? Maybe it was a burglary gone wrong. If that were the case, why go to the trouble of taking the homeowner? Was there reason to believe that the man and Guthrie were still in the area? Roughly ten hours passed before Guthrie was reported missing, more than enough time to drive, say, to the border. Nogales, it was noted, is an hour and a half almost due south of Tucson, a straight shot down Interstate 19.

This is peak tourist season for Tucson, the largest city between Phoenix and Mexico, with a metropolitan population of well over a million. I arrived from the sidewalk-ice mountains of New York City to morning temperatures pushing eighty degrees. It’s turned rainy and cooler in the past couple of days, but the creosote bushes are blooming yellow. People have been wearing shorts and sundresses. Many thousands of outsiders are in town for the weather but also for the annual gem-and-mineral show; next week, there’s a big soccer tournament.

History tells us that it will be a public tip that solves the Guthrie case—the authorities have reportedly received some thirty thousand of them, so far. Overwhelm, already a danger to investigators managing a complex case, isn’t helped by online conspiracy theorists and other noisemakers. People have been using A.I. to generate a “face” for the masked man and posting the results on social media. The crime scene had already possibly been compromised by the fact that after it was prematurely released, people came through and “trampled over everything,” a retired F.B.I. agent complained publicly. “People touched things without gloves on.” Early this week, a Domino’s pizza-delivery guy showed up with food for an influencer. The sheriff’s department had to ask the public not to order takeout to a crime scene.

Armchair analysis fills the space that is created by the absence of available facts. Nanos, the sheriff, stopped giving press conferences days ago. Then, on Friday, he sat down with CNN’s Ed Lavandera, and dispelled rumors about tension between his office and the F.B.I. During the interview, Nanos said, “We have some DNA, and we don’t know whose it is,” but declined to elaborate. His office then sent an update to the media, which included: “DNA other than Nancy Guthrie’s and those in close contact to her has been collected from the property. Investigators are working to identify who it belongs to. We are not disclosing where that DNA was located.”

By late afternoon, the batch of flowers and hopeful messages outside Guthrie’s home had swelled, and neighbors had attached yellow ribbons to their mailboxes and trees. Like too many others, I’d been driving back and forth between the sheriff’s department and the crime scene, as everybody waited for the next drip of news. To get to Guthrie’s neighborhood, you can take North Campbell Avenue, a straight road that cuts through a busy business district—taquerias, Oh My Chicken, Ross Dress for Less, Kung Fu Noodle, Cartel Coffee Lab—and begins to curve just after you cross the Rillito River. To the north, Mt. Lemmon looms, monumental, and the terrain gets a bit steeper. A few turns and there is Guthrie’s place. There are no gates, or street lights.

A signature feature of Tucson is its nighttime skies, which the city protects with an ordinance designed to suppress light pollution. Voorhies, the local whom I met on my first day in town, told me, “You can’t see your hand in front of your face.” Come back at night, he said, and listen to the coyotes howl. ♦

In the absorbing new thriller “Crime 101,” a man tells a woman that, if she wants to get in touch with him, all she has to do is post a beach pic to her Instagram account. Circumstances require that they keep their interactions a secret, and this will be their way of communicating in code. The film itself, which is set in Los Angeles, is replete with coastal imagery, though what these visuals signal isn’t especially cryptic: for all three of its protagonists, the beach is either a dreamed-of destination or a cherished refuge. A slippery jewel thief, Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth), hides out in a luxury apartment overlooking the Pacific. Detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), a Los Angeles Police Department veteran, aspires to have an ocean view himself one day, which comes as no surprise to Sharon Coombs (Halle Berry), an insurance broker he’s meeting with. “Why else,” she asks, “would anybody want to live in this town?”

As a happy longtime resident of Pasadena, a city in a landlocked stretch of Los Angeles County, I blanched at this wrongheaded sentiment and tried my best not to hold it against Sharon or the movie. I also stifled a laugh during a scene in which Lou, arguing with his soon-to-be ex-wife (a little-used Jennifer Jason Leigh), claims that he’s moving to the ocean: “I’m way more beach than you are!” he insists. Ryan Gosling’s Ken, from “Barbie,” couldn’t have said it better. Happily, though, “Crime 101,” which was written and directed by the English filmmaker Bart Layton, sidesteps more L.A. clichés than it barrels into, even allowing for its mild groaner of a title—a reference to Route 101. (The film shares that title with its source material, a Don Winslow novella set farther south, in San Diego.) Lou is trying to solve a string of robberies committed by a culprit who targets jewelry stores located along the 101, presumably to facilitate a speedy getaway. No one who’s inched their way through traffic between Hollywood and downtown will buy this logic, but no matter.

The robber, of course, is Davis, who is something of a pacifist prince of thieves. He abhors violence and endeavors to commit his crimes as humanely as possible, keeping the extractions clean by prepping heavily in advance. A tense opening heist sets the tone and establishes Davis’s M.O.: he intercepts a stash of valuable diamonds as they’re being transported from one location to the next, armed with a gun, a disguise, and, crucially, in-depth knowledge of the transporters’ home addresses, family members, and other personal details. Davis himself has no permanent address or family to speak of, and comes across as void of personal information. On a dinner date with a young woman named Maya (Monica Barbaro), he’s magnetically inscrutable; when she asks what he does for a living, he mumbles something about “software development” and moves on. Hemsworth, in a beautifully controlled performance, plays Davis as a charismatic savant—a tad clenched and awkward in his rare social interactions, yet still capable of friendliness, decency, and charm.

Those qualities bind him, in a spiritual sense, to Lou, who can’t suppress a quiet admiration for the criminal he’s pursuing, and also to Sharon, the insurance broker, who is unwittingly drawn into both men’s orbits. She’s investigating a claim filed by Sammy Kassem (Payman Maadi), a jewelry-store proprietor who was robbed by Davis, and soon she’s sparring verbally with Lou over the specifics of the crime. Later, Sharon and Lou will have a friendlier run-in at a yoga studio—a cautiously deployed SoCal cliché and a rare coincidence in a plot where connections and entanglements are otherwise quite plausibly mapped out. One way to read “Crime 101” is as a savvy, moderately sardonic corrective to Paul Haggis’s “Crash” (2005), in which various Angelenos are forever crossing and recrossing paths in ludicrously contrived fashion, and every fender bender is a cry of rebellion against the loneliness of life behind the wheel. “We crash into each other just to feel something,” someone says in “Crash,” and “Crime 101” comes close to redeeming even that heavy-handed sentiment. An accidental rear-end collision is what brings Davis and Maya together in the first place—and their ensuing relationship, though not without its bumps, sends the story on some of its more pleasurable curves.

Watching Davis and Maya gradually open up to each other—their first date begins at a chichi restaurant, which they quickly abandon for street tacos—you might be reminded of the characters played by James Caan and Tuesday Weld in “Thief,” Michael Mann’s Chicago-set thriller from 1981. Layton draws even more visual and narrative inspiration from “Heat” (1995) and “Collateral” (2004), the two exhilarating crime dramas that cemented Mann’s reputation as the reigning poet of nocturnal Los Angeles. More than once, “Crime 101,” shot by the director of photography Erik Alexander Wilson, grooves on the transfixing image of a freeway at night, backed up in both directions: two slow-moving rivers of light, one white and one red. It’s an obvious homage, but it works. The vistas are hypnotic to the point of drugginess.

There are other aesthetic Mann-erisms on display: in the gunmetal gleam of Wilson’s images; in the score, composed by Blanck Mass, which supplies an endless, infectious line of jittery propulsion; and in the car chases, which are unfailingly realistic and, as a consequence, astoundingly forceful. (When a car flips over mid-pursuit, your response will likely be not a whoop but a sharp intake of breath.) Yet the film’s greatest debts are less stylistic than philosophical: “Crime 101” is, like many a Mann movie, about the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of work. Davis, Lou, and Sharon all turn out to be detectives of a sort, each with a gift for quick-study discernment; they take an unmistakable pride in doing their jobs well and react defiantly when their employers fall short. Sharon, who’s spent years waiting to be made a partner at her firm, is repeatedly sidelined by corporate ageism and sexism. Lou is stymied by the matter-of-fact corruption of the Los Angeles Police Department, to the point of not even being able to trust his partner (Corey Hawkins). And Davis’s integrity puts him at odds with his longtime fence, Money (Nick Nolte, nice and growly as ever), who responds by enlisting the services of Ormon (Barry Keoghan), a platinum-blond thug on a motorcycle. Keoghan, with his flinty stare and wiry physique, is reliably cast as agents of chaos, and as Ormon he unleashes a level of violence that nearly tears a hole in the picture. You want him to die the moment he appears. Ormon’s rage isn’t just scary; it’s messy, unhinged, an affront to the smooth professionalism and sneaky compassion that Davis, Lou, and Sharon evince. For Keoghan, the role represents both a homecoming and a reversal: he starred in Layton’s previous feature, the docudrama “American Animals” (2018), in which he played an amateur crook of a rather more cautious, morally conflicted temperament.

“American Animals” was a painstaking deconstruction of a real-life heist, from 2004, which made room onscreen for the culprits as well as the actors playing them. Before that, Layton directed “The Imposter” (2012), a documentary portrait of a prodigiously gifted con artist. “Crime 101” may be his first entirely fictional feature, but it’s recognizably of a piece with his earlier work, in its fascination with the psychology of thieves, its attention to forensic details, and the exacting deliberation with which it unfolds. At two hours and twenty minutes, the film is as susceptible to sprawl as the city in which it unfolds, though I do wish that its wide-ranging love for Los Angeles—downtown, Echo Park, Hollywood, Historic Filipinotown, and Santa Monica are all on the long list of shooting locations—had translated to an equivalent curiosity about the city’s various siloed demographics. (Poverty, which turns out to be Davis’s greatest fear and motivator, is viewed chiefly as a white man’s affliction.) Maadi, the superb Iranian American actor who came to international prominence in Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation” (2011), establishes his character as a compelling presence in a few bristling early scenes—and then vanishes from the picture far too soon.

There’s a tension, too, between the observant realism of Layton’s style and the derivativeness of the plotting, though the three leads, all superb, smooth it over with considerable skill. You believe Hemsworth, Ruffalo, and Berry, even if you never quite lose sight of the world-weary archetypes they represent: the emotionally anesthetized crook, the rumpled detective, the industry veteran at the end of her tether. It was refreshing to emerge from “Crime 101” and only then remember that Ruffalo and Hemsworth, still best known to most of the moviegoing world as Hulk and Thor, have shared several bloated C.G.I. extravaganzas’ worth of screen time. In this way, Layton’s imperfect but enveloping L.A. noir offers an escape from what Hollywood typically considers escapism. The actors, no less than the characters they play, can take pride in a job well done. ♦

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If the Jeffrey Epstein case has a leading reporter on the national scene, her name is Julie K. Brown. An investigative journalist for the Miami Herald, Brown has interviewed dozens of Epstein’s victims and has meticulously anatomized how Epstein managed to win preposterously favorable treatment in the courts. Brown’s reporting on Epstein is credited with reopening the 2008 case against him. Her book “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story” was published in 2021.

The millions of documents recently (and chaotically) released by the Department of Justice have left Americans reading myriad e-mails and text messages that seem to describe, in their aggregate, a range of élites eager to curry favor with a criminal beyond the imaginings of the police blotter or the Marquis de Sade. The dreadful cast includes Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Ehud Barak, as well as various Wall Street wizards and real-estate magnates. And yet Brown’s main focus is on the names that fewer people know: the many girls and women who were treated for years with such cruelty.

When I spoke with Brown last week for The New Yorker Radio Hour, she was just about to publish an article in the Herald about President Trump’s telephone call to the Palm Beach police chief around the time of Epstein’s arrest in 2006. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Julie, as somebody who is almost single-handedly responsible for thrusting this terrible subject into the light, what does it feel like to see this gigantic onslaught of files after all this time?

Well, I wish I could say it was somewhat satisfying to finally see some truth in this, but the way that this is being handled right now by the Administration is very chaotic and messy. And it’s very hard to figure out what’s what when half a document is redacted, when the recipients and the person who sent the document are redacted. So I think in some ways this raises more questions and makes the public more distrustful. It was supposed to be an act of transparency. And I don’t see it as that, quite frankly.

Would you say that the release of these documents is purposeful, or chaotic on purpose, or chaotic because of a chaotic Administration?

I think it’s both [purposeful and chaotic]. I actually think part of it was done on purpose because it’s sort of what this Administration does: distract, try to take people’s minds off of things, confuse. So, I think part of it is purposeful. But from what I’ve read so far I also think that it also has to be a reflection of the fact that the Justice Department has never really organized themselves well enough to figure out how to go about this investigation. It is so massive. And I think that it was just something that they just never got a handle on to begin with.

How many documents are there?

They’re saying six million, because they released three million and they say that there are two to three million documents left. Remember, though, part of this is a lot of repetition—some of these documents, you see multiple times. But the other interesting thing is: We haven’t seen any of Epstein’s e-mails from around the time that he was buddies with Trump. Not that Trump used e-mail, but that was when Trump was in his orbit, so to speak. So we’re not getting any view of what was going on during that time period, which would’ve been, like, the early two-thousands.

Well, let’s start with what we know about the relationship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. What is Trump saying it was, and what’s the reality? What are we learning?

Trump has said that he really wasn’t as good of friends with him, that he had a falling out with him, that they had some events together—he was at Mar-a-Lago at some events, but he’s downplayed that, I think it’s fair to say. From what we have seen, they were much closer—certainly much closer than I thought they were when I did this story originally. I think we’re getting new information that shows that maybe they were closer, but we don’t find any evidence thus far that he was involved in any of Epstein’s crimes.

Can you be a little bit more specific about the relationship, what it consisted of?

Well, I think that they were sort of competitors, in a way. They were both very wealthy, connected men, and I think they competed. We know that there was this real-estate deal in the early two-thousands in Palm Beach, and then Trump jumped on it, and it ended up in a bidding war, and Trump won. And then he sold the property—it was this massive mansion—for oodles and oodles of money. Of course, Epstein was really mad about that. So I think Trump wanted to show off his wealth to Epstein, and Epstein wanted to show off his wealth.

That’s a situation of rich guys, whose is bigger, et cetera.

Yes.

What about their social relationship? And they seem to bond—to put this delicately—over the question of women.

Yes. They definitely did. Trump did an interview saying that [Epstein] likes women and he really likes them young. And so that was the same way they competed over money. They were also, I think, to some degree, competing over their prowess with women.

How did Trump feel about him liking them young? Was he repulsed? Was he jealous? What was his attitude toward that?

He would say he was repulsed, I think, but I think the culture at the time—it probably wasn’t as frowned upon. Not that being with an underage girl is ever something that you shouldn’t frown upon. But it was a different time, and I think that when an underage girl showed up or was in their midst it wasn’t a case where they kicked her out. They were probably just amused by it, and Epstein more so.

What specifically have you been able to look at that surprises you, in all the documents that have come your way? What have you found out?

That this is a lot bigger, and it spans the globe more so than I ever thought before. And I say this because even from my early reporting I had spoken to investigators who looked into Epstein who said that he had recruiters, for example, and scouts in other countries to get him women. We are now seeing from some of these e-mails that he had not just a couple scouts. I mean, he had scouts, it seems like, in almost every country.

What does that mean? He had people looking out for teen-age girls to bring to the United States?

Yes. And he hired lawyers, by the way, who did their visas to get them over here. Or work permits. I mean, he used his modelling agency as a way to get them over here, but it was clear that they were not just here to do modelling. In my original reporting, I reported that there was a bookkeeper for that modelling agency who did a deposition, and she said that that was not what this was about—that there were these so-called parties and events that were held that they would send models to, essentially, to have sex.

You’re publishing a story that has implications for the President of the United States where the Epstein case is concerned. What does it say?

We have found a document in these files that is an interview that the police chief of Palm Beach gave to the F.B.I. And in that interview the police chief, Michael Reiter, told the F.B.I. that back when Epstein’s case had first come to the attention of the police, and Epstein was first reported as a suspect in doing this—

What’s the year?

Around 2006. Around that time period, Trump called the police chief and he said to the police chief, “Thank God you’re doing something about him, because . . .” And I’m just quoting off the top of my head. I don’t have the document in front of me, but he said, “Thank God—everybody knew this.” He also knew about [Ghislaine] Maxwell’s role [as Epstein’s associate], calling her “evil.” We have this F.B.I. report of this interview that the chief gave to the F.B.I. where he is recalling this conversation that he had with Trump many, many years ago about Epstein. So it does raise some questions about how much Trump knew—whether he knew the extent of Epstein’s crimes.

So, in 2006, Donald Trump has what kind of communication with the police chief?

He called the police chief on the phone.

And there’s paper on that?

There is. There’s an F.B.I. report. It’s an interview that the police chief gave to the F.B.I.

So what does that suggest to you about Trump—that he was doing the right thing or that he was complicit in some way?

I think people are going to look at it one of two ways: A) that he was somewhat of an informant for the police, in that he called them after this case became active and he became aware of it, and admitted, “Wait a minute, I know he was doing this.”

Or you could look at it another way, in that he was also one of those people who knew, and really didn’t go to the police before then to tell them what he was doing. The police were sort of hearing that there were things happening at Epstein’s mansion well before this, but, every time they went to investigate, all the women who were coming and going who they saw on the street and stopped were of age. So they couldn’t find any evidence that a real crime was being committed. But if in fact Trump knew that there were some crimes being committed against underage girls, and he knew about it and didn’t tell them ahead of time, I guess people will look at that from a different vantage point, in that he should have told the police sooner.

Your sources are not just law enforcement; you’ve talked to a lot of survivors. How are they reacting to these documents?

Well, they’re disturbed and very upset because their names are still in there. I mean, the F.B.I. had only one job here, and that was to take out the victims’ names, and their names are sprinkled throughout these documents. So they’re quite irate about the fact that they have so many redactions of people—other people—but yet many of the victims’ names are still in these public documents.

Julie, as you know, initially there were a lot of voices in MAGA demanding that these be released. You had the Attorney General saying, The report’s just on my desk, and I’m going through it. And then there was a delay. What do you know about the dynamics of why these things were finally released? Because Donald Trump himself does not seem thrilled about it.

I just think that it got to be such a big story. And, as you know, there’s been sort of a crack in the MAGA movement pertaining to this story. And you have people like Joe Rogan saying, “Why aren’t they releasing it?” It just became this battle cry for people. In some ways, this is the one thing that America agrees on: that these files should be made public. So I just think that it was something that they could not stop from happening without there being an even bigger crack in MAGA.

What are the stakes for Donald Trump? Trump says he wants the country to move on from this story, but, as you report, Trump is on an F.B.I. list of people suspected of possible wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. The D.O.J. says that there is no credible evidence to pursue. So where are we?

Well, I think that they should pursue everybody. That’s all the victims want. They want a credible investigation, and they’re not seeing it. And, quite frankly, thus far, I haven’t seen it. Because you can say that someone’s not credible, but there have to be some kind of notes. There has to be a report. There has to be some evidence that they went and talked to these people. Or if they couldn’t talk to them, why? And we’re not seeing that. And I think that’s part of the problem here. The government can say all they want, “There’s no credible evidence, nothing to see here, nothing more to investigate.” But this case from the beginning has been a thorn in the Justice Department’s side, because the public doesn’t trust that they did what they were supposed to do—that the investigators were thorough.

One of the people in Donald Trump’s orbit, in his Cabinet, who comes up a lot in the new documents is the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick. Tell me about that.

He was a next-door neighbor, as I understand it, to Epstein, in New York. And it sounds like he had been invited with his wife to Epstein’s mansion. He mentioned in an interview that he felt creepy when he got into the mansion. I don’t know if you’ve seen photographs of this mansion, but there are some creepy aspects to it: photographs on the wall, paintings, eyeballs, just very weird things in his house. And so he said, after he had that brief tour, he felt like, “This is horrible. I don’t want anything to do with this man again.” And he said this publicly, and then we found documents in these files that showed that not only did he continue to communicate with him after this allegedly happened but that he even got an invite to the island and took his family to Epstein’s island. So you have to wonder, why he would—

This is where I have to stop you. And you have no reason to know the answer, but I have to bring it up. Why would you bring your family to Epstein’s island? There are a lot of islands in the Caribbean and elsewhere. You can take your family anywhere on vacation when you have the money that Howard Lutnick has. Why would you bring your children there?

I can’t answer it. There were plenty of other people in that category, too, that brought their families there.

Not exactly Disneyland.

No. I can’t really answer that question.

Julie, I want to play you a clip of the congressman Ted Lieu, from Southern California, speaking on February 3rd:

Why are Republicans so interested in Bill, Hillary Clinton? It’s because they’re trying to distract from the fact that Donald Trump is in the Epstein files thousands and thousands of times. In those files, there’s highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children; of Donald Trump threatening to kill children. So I encourage the press to go look at these allegations, and I’m highly disturbed that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche just got the law wrong. Yesterday, he said, essentially, that it is not a crime to party with Jeffrey Epstein. Well, that’s actually not correct. If Jeffrey Epstein was human-trafficking minors for these sex parties and you show up and patronize the establishment at that party? Yes, you’re guilty, because patronizing is part of the law, the federal sex-trafficking law. So Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche just got that wrong, which maybe explains why they aren’t investigating all these folks, including Donald Trump.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with Lieu mentioning allegations of Donald Trump raping and threatening to kill children. What is he talking about?

Well, when the F.B.I. arrested Epstein in 2019, they put out a big call. They wanted more victims to come forward. So they put out this 800-number tip line that you can call for the F.B.I. The F.B.I. got, I want to say, hundreds of tips. And there were a couple that mentioned Trump. Now, some of them were a little bizarre—you would sort of think, no way. Eating, I don’t know, babies. Or there’s some strange ones in there that you could see were just crazy.

Who’s saying these things? Who’s making these accusations?

Well, these are people who called the tip line, like, “I have a tip on Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump . . .”

It could be any malicious lunatic out there. Let’s be very clear.

It could be. But my point is, there was one, I know, that involved a thirteen-year-old girl, where they said that she was giving Trump oral sex and she bit him, and he slapped her. This is one of the tips that came in. And what the F.B.I. and the Justice Department are saying—this tip list, by the way, they didn’t mean for it to be put out there in this tranche of documents. My point is that we can’t see whether they followed up on all these tips. And certainly they should have followed up on the ones that had names attached to them.

Well, I guess this has to stay in the category of “we’ll see later what becomes of it,” but it is worrying. One of the most shocking revelations in this document dump was how many prominent people continued to engage with Epstein after—after—he was registered as a sex offender. I’m not asking you as a psychologist or a sociologist. But how do you explain that? And what was known to the general public about his crimes at the time?

Well, that’s really a good question. You have to sort of break it down. You have to remember that when he was in Florida and he served that year, thirteen months, in jail [starting in 2008], he had pled guilty to essentially what was a prostitution-with-a-minor charge. When he came out of jail, he really mounted a P.R. campaign, hired a lot of people who can help him with his image, to point out that this was—

Like Peggy Siegal, the P.R. person.

Yeah. And he did a press release—we could see it, in the history, that he was doing all these things. Donating tons of money to all these causes, and trying to just improve his image. And when you think about it, if all you knew at the time was, “Oh, well, the charge on paper was that he solicited a minor for prostitution . . .” But, as the years wore on, by 2010, 2011, there were more than a dozen underage girls who filed civil lawsuits against him. And there was a huge lawsuit that was filed against the United States government for giving him this plea deal [in which, in exchange for Epstein pleading guilty to state prosecution charges in 2008, the U.S. Attorney’s office ended the federal investigation]—which, by the way, they kept secret for a whole year until he got out of jail. And that was by design, because they did not want the victims to know that they did this deal, because they knew the victims would protest. And then the judge would say, “Well, wait a minute. I’ve got twenty-five victims in court here who are protesting this. I’m not going to approve this plea deal.” So his lawyers were pretty brilliant and figured out a way to make it look like he hadn’t really committed as serious of a crime. They limited the scope of his crimes.

Julie, when you inevitably punched your own name into the search engine of these files, what did you discover?

Well, just like everything, Epstein wanted to control the narrative. And he wanted to meet with me after my series ran.

Your series ran in the Miami Herald. What was the date?

It ran November, 2018.

Did he reach out to you personally?

No.

So he never did try to meet with you?

He was advised that it probably wasn’t a good idea. His idea of doing that was—

For once, he got good advice.

Yeah, and followed it, I guess.

Yeah.

I guess.

If you had met with him, what would you have asked him?

That’s a good question that I hadn’t really thought about. I guess I would just ask him, “What were you thinking?” I mean, these were girls. Did it ever occur to you—the fact that when they were scared and when they were there and they were uncomfortable, that perhaps this . . . He did this over such a long period of time. Did it ever, at any point, cross your mind that this was not only criminal but it was just amoral? It was just like being a monster?

I have to confess that I punched my name in there, thinking it would come up zero. And there it was, multiple times—it was just articles that people had sent him, my writing about Russia, whatever it was. And then at one point my name appears on a long list assembled by a P.R. person of people you might invite to some sort of social event with, you know, two hundred other people. I never got such an invitation, I’m not worried about it—but it was a bit startling to see that. And I wonder if you think that there are people who are more implicated, who might’ve stupidly gone to a dinner and then never seen him again, who are somehow implicated, injured by this process. What do you think about that?

Yes. I definitely think that there are probably some people in that category who made a bad decision to go to an event where he was a prominent guest, or one of his dinners at his own mansion. And they went because somebody invited them and told them, for example, the Prince was going to be there. But the people in that category aren’t mentioned repeatedly in these files.

Hundreds of times.

Yeah, hundreds of times. It’s different if you just see one person you knew had dinner with them one time and you don’t see anything else in there.

What did the Biden Administration do about all this? Why did the Biden Administration sit on these documents? They had access to these files, too, didn’t they?

Definitely. And one would hope that they would’ve really pressed and continued this investigation. We don’t know that they didn’t. We don’t know that they weren’t still investigating some of this. It’s just not clear from the files whether they did or they didn’t. And the other thing to remember is: they did convict [Ghislaine] Maxwell, and she did appeal that conviction. So technically the case was still an open case. So you usually don’t open your files when you still are investigating or litigating a conviction. So that’s one excuse I guess they could use. But I do think that the Justice Department failed these survivors through almost every Presidential Administration that we’ve had. I mean, this should have been investigated throughout this time.

And now what’s really horrible about it is, as you know, when a crime is committed, especially against young people, children, as they get older, their memories fade, the evidence isn’t as readily available. The diary that maybe these girls kept when they were sixteen about this, they probably don’t have anymore. So had the prosecutors done their job back in 2007, there would’ve not only been far fewer victims here but he could have gone to prison and we wouldn’t even have this happening right now. We wouldn’t even be talking about him.

Let’s talk about the prosecutor, Alex Acosta, who arranged, let’s just put it this way, an extraordinarily lenient plea deal that Epstein made in 2008. Can he be compelled to explain how and why he made that deal? In your 2018 reporting, you speculated that the plea deal could have been linked to Epstein giving information to the government in someone else’s trial for financial crimes.

Well, I don’t think that was it, but it was something that was in the files that I felt a duty to mention—that there was an F.B.I. document that indicated that he was going to provide some kind of inside information on this case, which involved Bear Stearns, who Epstein used to work for, and it was a fraud case. And I just don’t think that Acosta would’ve fallen on his sword for a fraud case that didn’t really have anything to do with him. It would’ve been silly, quite frankly, for him to do that.

Epstein hired some of the most powerful lawyers in America. Kenneth Starr and Jay Lefkowitz were part of Kirkland & Ellis, which was a law firm that Acosta had worked for before. And it is one of the premier law firms, and both Starr and Lefkowitz were part of the Federalist Society. And Acosta’s real goal seemingly was to become a Supreme Court Justice. So if you want to become a Supreme Court Justice, you don’t want to piss off powerful members of the Federalist Society.

And is that an inference you’re drawing on your own, or sources with reason to know helped you to reach that conclusion or possibility?

I think both. I mean, I was told that, and then I could tell from comments that Acosta had made in the past, doing just some research on that, and just knowing how Epstein hired. I mean, he hired every single one of his attorneys for a reason, and he wanted an in. He wanted to be able to understand his adversary very well. And one way to do that would be to hire people who had contact with them one way or another.

What were Epstein’s politics, and do they matter?

Let me tell you why I don’t think it matters. Sexual assault doesn’t discriminate based on political party. There were bad people on all sides here. There was not one party or the other, and it kind of frustrates me sometimes when people try to make this into a Republican versus Democrat issue, because it had nothing to do with that. It had to do with power and money and sex. And it really didn’t matter what your political party was. There were people, as I said, on both sides here who were implicated or have been implicated.

When you look at the array of people who spent time with Epstein, who among the high and the mighty do you come out shocked at how they behaved? I mean, look at Bill Gates’s [alleged] behavior, for example. [Epstein, in a note sent to his own e-mail account, wrote that he had facilitated trysts with married women for Gates and helped him get drugs “in order to deal with consequences of sex with Russian girls.” Gates has denied these allegations.] I don’t know the guy, but I interviewed him on this program, and he’s been in our lives in one way or another for a very long time. And call me naïve, but I was appalled.

Yeah.

Who’s on that list for you?

He’s definitely one of the people I think everybody was a little surprised at, but—

I wasn’t a little surprised. I was a lot more than that.

A lot?

Yeah.

Well, you know what? I’ve been doing this for so long, and I just know from covering, especially sexual-assault cases, a lot of men act completely different—you wouldn’t even know them when they’re among their buddies just talking about women. So in some ways there really hasn’t been a whole lot that has been surprising to me. Like I said, Gates is sort of this guy who seems like a little bit of a geek, quite frankly, so you wouldn’t . . . But you know what? A lot of these men were older men, too. So it’s almost, like, maybe a club of people that don’t normally get the girls, so to speak.

Despite all their wealth and power, they needed Epstein in some way to do what for them? To hook them up with children?

Yes. Yes. Or young women. But it’s important to understand this wasn’t Epstein going to these women and girls and saying, “I’m going to pay you two hundred dollars if you have sex with me or if you have sex with So-and-So.” That’s not what he did. He used fraudulent means, which is one of the elements of sex trafficking. In other words, he said, “I want to hire you as my assistant, and I’m going to pay you a hundred thousand dollars a year,” or “I want to send you to college,” or “You’re a great artist,” or a ballerina or a model. “I know that I can get you into the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.” That’s how he got these women trapped and that’s how he did it. And then they got kind of enamored with him because he acted sort of like this father figure—“I’m going to change your life.” And “you can do this, that.” There are tons of e-mails between him and women in these tranches that show him talking to these women who he wants to sort of snare.

And then there are other e-mails that are clearly after he already had his way with them, or they got too old for him, where he’s saying, “Well, I don’t know what you want me to do about it. This was your choice.” There are these trajectories that you could see with some of these women—that at first he kind of gets them under his wing and makes them believe that he’s going to change their lives. Some of them fell in love with him. And then you could see in later e-mails that he’s essentially just discarding them.

Let’s talk about conspiracies. QAnon, for a long time, has been full of crazy, lurid imagery about God knows what—human sacrifice, and . . . Watching the grotesqueness of Epstein’s world laid out in these documents, one after the other, I have to think that it fuels conspiracy thinking because, in fact, the Epstein world was full of it.

Yeah. And I’ll point out another part of this that isn’t talked about much, but—some of the victims here were really damaged. He wouldn’t have been able to go after someone who had a lot of confidence and had a real life, who had a future. He purposefully targeted vulnerable girls who came from nothing, or they were homeless, or in foster care, for example. And the damage that he did to some of these girls affected them for the rest of their lives.

Those tips that we saw—they come from people who have been really traumatized. That’s why I’m saying that I don’t think you can discount all those crazy tips. I have found that some of the women who had those crazy aspects to their stories—there was still some shred of truth to what they were saying. It’s just that they were so traumatized. And this is common, by the way. I’ve talked to F.B.I. specialists who interview children, especially, who have been traumatized. Your brain is almost damaged when something like this happens to you as a child.

One of the theories that was going around a lot, as you know, Julie, was the idea that Epstein was not only trying to enrich himself all the time, and also have lots of girls underage and otherwise around him for the obvious purpose, but that he was working for some sort of foreign intelligence agency. I assume you’re discounting that.

This is how I look at that: I don’t think it’s impossible, but I haven’t seen any evidence that shows that he worked, as in was employed by, the C.I.A., or Mossad, or any other government. But I do think that he used his contacts in all these places—in Israel, in Russia, and in London, wherever he had a connection—as currency in order to enrich himself, to make money in some way.

Julie, as you go through these documents, as you make your calls, as you make your reporting rounds, what are you still looking for in this case?

I think I’m still trying to understand how he—and this is the bigger picture—how he got away with this for so long. And which people should have held him accountable along the way.

We know that there were several F.B.I. investigations into him over the years. There wasn’t just the 2007 investigation. There were subsequent investigations over the years. He was abusing a lot of young girls, and I don’t understand why they kept, sort of, closing the book on him and moving on all the time, including through the Biden Administration. It might be in the two million or three million files we haven’t seen yet, but it looks to me like they weren’t doing anything, because there would be records showing that they interviewed So-and-So, or that they got some intelligence information about one of these men who was involved.

I can see e-mails there now between Epstein and some of these men, who were clearly working for him in other countries—men and women, by the way, because he used a lot of women. A lot of the women who he abused—when he had nothing left for them and they were older and he was over them—they went to work for him and they helped find him girls. There are tons of e-mails where the woman is saying, “Will you still see me, even though I can’t bring you girls tonight?” It’s just very sad how he manipulated people, and especially girls and young women.

Is there any evidence that you credit that he did not commit suicide in jail?

Well, I don’t think he committed suicide.

You don’t?

No, I absolutely do not think he committed suicide.

What do you think happened and what’s the evidence for it?

Look, I also covered prisons for a very long time in Florida. I did a lot of stories about how crime happens in prisons. And someone who is a pedophile—when you enter that prison, from Day One, you have a target on your back. They’re the lowest people on the hierarchy of any prison—it’s almost a trophy to get rid of them. And so I think that it’s possible he could have been targeted. We also know, for example, the same thing happened with Whitey Bulger. There is a history in our federal prison system.

You’re making a supposition. You don’t have evidence [that he didn’t kill himself].

Well, what’s evidence? Evidence that the guards lied on their reports? That they reported that they made checks on him, and didn’t? Is it that all the cameras didn’t work? They never recovered the so-called noose—the piece of fabric that he allegedly used. They don’t even know which one it was. The fact that if he broke three bones in his neck, which takes a lot of force—this man was a very frail man at the end—even if he was to do that by tying himself to his bunk, every single item on that top bunk was undisturbed. If you’re pulling on a bunk with enough force to break three bones in your neck, wouldn’t you think that the items would have been sort of toppled? I mean, I could just go on and on. The reports are very odd.

He allegedly tried to commit suicide a couple weeks before this, but when he went in to tell them what had happened, when they found him on the floor, the first thing he said was, “My roommate did it to me. He tried to kill me,” and “He had been threatening me for weeks.” An ex-cop who was in jail for killing four people—that was the cellmate who you picked for Jeffrey Epstein? I mean, too many things don’t make any sense. Epstein said he tried to kill him, and then Epstein sort of changed his story and said, “I don’t remember.” But Epstein never said he tried to commit suicide. He only said that he thought that his cellmate had tried to kill him.

Julie, if you had had the opportunity to interview him in prison, what would you have asked him, or what would you have wanted to know?

I think he believed he was above the law, and I think I would have tried to get at that, and why he thought he was above the law. Who are these people who you associated with? Did anybody lead you to believe this? He would have said, “Everybody has a price,” or “I was smart because I got the right people in my corner.” And I think I would have tried to sort of get him to admit that there were other people who were in this to help him get away with these crimes—that it wasn’t just an act of nature that they decided not to go after him.

Julie, you’ve been on this story for years. You’ve spent a lot of time with people who’ve been harmed terribly by Epstein. You’ve been immersed in this, and it’s very hard to explain to civilians what being immersed in a story for year after year can be like, especially something this ugly. What mark has it left on your life?

You have to be a little driven to do this kind of work, and to keep hammering at it. I’ve hammered at it. It wasn’t just the first story. I mean, I’ve hammered at it all this time. And I think really, to be honest with you, it’s the victims—and that’s the case with almost anything that I’ve done. When I covered prisons, I remember some of those inmates who were tortured. And with this story I think about the victims all the time. I just think as if they were a friend of mine, or if it was my daughter. I just feel like they can’t all be lying. This happened, and I just feel driven by the fact that people have covered it up. They’ve covered it up. And I’m going to keep working on it until we find out why they’re covering it up, or who is covering it up. ♦